Butt Paste -- it's a diaper-rash cream, so get your mind out of the gutter -- is the primary sponsor of Kim Crosby, also known as the driver of the car that causes uncontrollable laughter when it rolls by.

Driving is a genderless pursuit, but female drivers often fail to make it in auto racing because they lack the money, not the skill.

What Crosby and George Boudreaux, the pharmacist who created Butt Paste, have done is pure marketing genius. Pair catchy product with novelty, and the result is a columnist with the sense of humor of a 12-year-old writing about them.

Crosby and Boudreaux have smartly homed in on an untapped area in NASCAR -- the female consumer. While men are off running the world, women run the household and buy all the products for said household. Eighty-five percent of buying decisions in the home are made by women. Forty percent of the people in the stands at NASCAR races also are women. So imagine how much better the pitch sells when it comes from a woman.

"If a female has Butt Paste on the back of her car, people are going to talk about it," the Tallahassee native said.

Correction: If a good female driver has Butt Paste on it, people will talk about it. Crosby is no gimmick. She finished 20th at Talladega last season, an impressive start for someone making their Busch Series debut.

But a major goal for a NASCAR driver is to keep their sponsors happy. Right now, Butt Paste, the smallest company representing a driver, is very happy. The company did $6 million in sales last year and Boudreaux expects that to double this year. It makes the roughly $40,000 per race Boudreaux will sink into Crosby seem like pennies.

"That's a lot of tubes of Butt Paste," he said.

Crosby will race 12 times this season, which more than doubles the number of races she participated in last year. She's just the third woman to ever compete full time on the Busch Series. So she wouldn't care if she had to eat Butt Paste, as long as she was racing.

Sure, she gets a lot of grief for having the Butt Paste car. Her former middle school kids, who she left for good in January, have a field day with it. If I knew my junior high principal endorsed Butt Paste on the side, I might have gotten expelled.

"They call me `Butt Lady,' or `Butt Girl,' " Crosby said.

At races, drivers smirk and point to her car. Folks blush when they come up to ask Crosby what Butt Paste is -- since the name itself leads the mind in all sorts of directions.

"A lot of people think it's a steak seasoning," she said. "There was something out there called `Butt Rub' and it was like a meat tenderizer."

Always the adventurer, I went and bought a tube of Butt Paste at the grocery store. Shaquille O' Neal and Oprah swear by it, so it should be good enough for my medicine cabinet.

It turns out Butt Paste isn't just for babies. It can be used for any kind of skin chafing.

It also can be used for chapped lips. A thousand tasteless jokes just came to mind, but thankfully my fear of unemployment far outweighs my crassness.